It’s a PolaChrome world…

So yesterday, I posted pictures taken with Polaroid’s defunct 35mm instant slide film PolaBlue, which is supposed to create blue-on-white monochromatic images. Well, by the time I got the film, it had developed a color shift to create blue-on-magenta images.

I also received a few packs of Polaroid’s color slide film, PolaChrome, and I popped a roll of it into the Nikon F100. Last Thursday, I took some shots around downtown Albany with it.

PolaChrome, like PolaBlue and the other Pola-siblings, is sold with a developing pack. You use the developing pack in a special developing machine, you wait a few moments, and then your film is done.

As before, the PolaChrome film does develop into viewable images – sorta – I guess – but the film still contains remnants of a black gooey developing mask. The mask can be washed off with warm water, but I thought why not see what the pictures would look like both with the black mask and without it.

So I scanned in five of the images with my Minolta scanner. Then, I took the film and washed it in warm water. And then I discovered – OOPS – I used too much warm water. Normally this gunk just floats off the film the second it touches water. But since the black compound wasn’t budging, I turned on the faucet and blasted it with hot water. That removed the black compound – as well as whatever image was underneath it. And I’m not going to use the lomoographer’s excuse and say it was a “happy accident.” It was a boo-boo, plain and simple.

So on the left are the PolaChrome shots that came straight out of the developer, with the black mask on them – and on the right are the re-scanned and washed PolaChrome shots. In hindsight, I should have just left the compound on, it actually frames some of the pictures in a more flattering way.

ORIGINAL POLACHROME SHOTS	WASHED POLACHROME SHOTS

So there’s my weekend of PolaBlue and PolaChrome. And I still have a few cans of this stuff left… as soon as I get some PolaGraph and PolaPan film – Polaroid’s other 35mm instant slide brethren – I may do a photo trip somewhere with all the different films and see what develops.